{"id":87,"date":"2010-08-27T00:27:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-26T23:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/?p=87"},"modified":"2016-09-18T16:49:06","modified_gmt":"2016-09-18T15:49:06","slug":"peru-trip-9-saqsaywaman-cuzco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/peru-trip-9-saqsaywaman-cuzco\/","title":{"rendered":"Peru Trip #9 – Saqsaywaman, Cuzco"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Me<\/a>
\nWell, the Incas were truly extraordinary masons. For all that this was – in European chronology – a medieval culture, in the 15th and 16th centuries CE, it was a megalithic culture. Not the megalithic culture of thousands of years BCE, on the Atlantic fringe of Europe and the Mediterranean, but a megalithic culture that had mastered building with stone in an extraordinary way. There are mortice and tendon joints, and metallic rings sunk into carved grooves between stones, inside these huge walls, and carefully graded horizontals that incorporate subtle ratchets at strategic points. The basic shape is trapezoidal: walls and doorways and niches that stand with legs apart. All this makes Inca buildings effectively earthquake proof – both supremely stable and protected from horizontal movement.
\n\"Example<\/a><\/p>\n

Churches built by the Spanish on top of Inca temples (Christianity,
\nafter all, built on top of pagan sites the world over, to cancel out the
\nold gods with their new religion) fell in the earthquakes of 1650 and
\n1950 and 1986. The Inca temples are only ruined by deliberate Spanish
\ndestruction, and by having been treated as quarries right up until legal
\nprotection in 1936. Cusco city is an image of the Puma, with the
\nTemple of the Sun at its phallus, and the complex of Saqsaywaman at its
\nhead (the name Saqsaywaman literally means, Puma’s head).
\n\"Our
\n\"A<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\nThe zigzag construction is the hair on the lower jaw of the Puma, the
\nthree tiers the three levels of the cosmos – underworld (snake), earth
\n(puma), and sky (condor). All that is left now is the foundations – you
\ncan see the drainage holes that kept the place dry during the rainy
\nseason. There were three towers on top of Saqsaywaman – one 160km
\nsquare, and one circular with three concentric rings of stone, that was
\nan enormous water tank. The hydraulic mastery of these genius
\nstonemasons, furthermore, continues to work perfectly where these
\ntemples still stand, serving water at constant temperature and flow
\nregardless of season, from sources modern archaeologists have simply not
\nfound. <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\nThere is ample evidence of how they were able to take water from high
\nplaces, channel it through carefully carved stones down into valleys and
\nback up to high places on the other side of valleys, using the pressure
\ncreated by shrinking the bore of the grooves they forced the water
\nthrough. These technologies, moreover, were sacred – stone and water,
\nand the knowledge of their manipulation, were pure. There is no mortar
\nholding any of these stones together. The water flows through holes
\nbored through stone, along channels paved with stone tiles, never
\nthrough clay pipes. Sand, clay and ramps were used, but only to
\ntransport the stone: the quarry for the main temples at Cuzco is 17km
\naway, and it is estimated that it took 20,000 people working every day
\n77 years to build just the one large temple as Saqsaywaman on the hill
\noverlooking the city. They did not have the wheel. Yep, that’s right,
\nthey did all this without using wheels. The Incas were truly
\nextraordinary masons.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, the Incas were truly extraordinary masons. For all that this was – in European chronology – a medieval culture, in the 15th and 16th centuries CE, it was a megalithic culture. Not the megalithic culture of thousands of years BCE, on the Atlantic fringe of Europe and the Mediterranean, but a megalithic culture that … Continue reading “Peru Trip #9 – Saqsaywaman, Cuzco”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archaeology","category-journeyman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":918,"href":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions\/918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}